The Cover-Up 2.0

I feel kind of bad for singling this band out in this installment of our album cover Hall of Shame, given that I spent a good chunk of my formative years obsessively going through Touch & Go Records mailorder catalogs & making notes in the margins the way that most fourteen year olds would do with their history textbooks. Making fun of Korn for hideous graphic design (see "the Cover-Up 1.0") is easy because there's obviously NO redeeming value in a Korn album, cover art or otherwise. But this cover is so bad that not even David Yow can be exempt from my criticisms this time around. Not to mention that I wouldn't be able to shake feminist equivalent of Catholic guilt if I didn't call bullshit on this one.



Ladies & gentleman, here we have the cover of Love's Miracle, the new album from Qui, featuring one Mister David Yow of the Jesus Lizard fame. I really shouldn't have to tell you why this is such a terrible album cover, but let's examine this briefly, shall we? For starters, the graphic design looks like something that someone whipped up their high school remedial Photoshop class ("Dude, wouldn't it be, like, so totally awesome if the band's name was spelled out in the clouds by one of those fuckin' SKYWRITING planes?!"). Consider that in conjunction with the ridiculous, gold faux-cursive font they used for the title, that looks like it would be more in place on a flyer for some keg party at a sorority house. Then we have the highly questionable fashion choice of the pseudo-Jim Morrison, open-leather-jacket-with-no-shirt look, but this isn't a column in Esquire or Vogue, so I'll let that one slide. Now we come to the real clincher that sent these guys straight into this esteemed feature in our little blog: the dead naked woman face down in the grass with ants crawling all over her. Now, "classy" was never really a term that I associated with the Jesus Lizard or any of those noisy, ugly early-to-mid-90s Touch & Go/Amphetamine Reptile axis bands. When I'm listening to Shellac or the Melvins or whatever, I'm also not expecting some manifesto that would be better suited to a Bikini Kill record. But this totally crosses into that category of bad album covers that is dominated by angry, young metalcore bands who exclusively write songs about strangling & dismembering their ex-girlfriends who left them for dudes with better nautical star tattoos. Something like this, perhaps?



I had this Qui record in my hands for about a week or so & everytime I looked at the cover, I cringed & suddenly forgot to actually put the album on. Yikes. However, I did finally listen to it & I must say that while I'm glad that the fucked up spirit of the Jesus Lizard is being somewhat channeled in Qui, I could have done without the Frank Zappa & Pink Floyd covers, guys.